The use of vending machines to dispense beverages, as well as food, to the consumer is a common practice at work and public places, schools, recreational areas, and countless other places. However, in recent years challenges have been posed to the beverage vending industry. For example, some schools have banned the sale of sugared beverages, such as pop, soda, and other carbonated beverages, for health reasons. This can leave numerous slots open in the vending machines that once vended such soft drinks. The removal of such soft drinks can create an opportunity to fill these empty slots with another product. However, trying to find an item that has a suitable size and shape that would allow easy replacement into these slots creates a specific problem.
While there are vending machines already on the market that have the ability to vend food products, because of the different types of packaging required or used for these food products, many of the sites that have vending machines require two different machines: one for beverages and one for food items. This need for additional machines leads to increased costs associated with energy consumption and maintenance of these machines. Therefore, it is desirable to have a vending machine that is capable of vending both food items and beverages from one machine.
While some efforts have been made to solve this problem, they have been limited to using aluminum cans to package the food product. This presents certain challenges, for example, such cans are not resealable. A further problem with the use of aluminum cans is associated with the current trend of using bottles in beverage dispensing machines. Aluminum cans are not the same size and shape of current plastic soda bottles. Thus, these cans may pose compatibility issues in dispensing from these beverage bottle vending machines. Therefore, there is a need for a container that can contain food and is compatible with current-style beverage vending machines, where the container can be vended in the same beverage vending machines.